Until recently Democrats in Connecticut, including Governor Malloy himself, were complaining that big business would take over politics because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision that the free-speech rights of corporations include political advertising.

But lately the agents of Connecticut’s Democratic administration have been extracting hundreds of thousands of dollars in political donations from state contractors and state-regulated companies in what is a scheme of targeting if not extortion. While Connecticut’s largest utility company, Northeast Utilities, long has maintained a political action committee, what the Hartford Courant disclosed the other day seems unprecedented -- an appeal to NU executives by the company’s chief executive officer, Thomas J. May, to contribute to a Democratic committee in support of the governor’s re-election. The appeal duly produced more than $46,000.

May’s appeal praised the governor for having “battled through issues of historic proportions,” citing many of those issues but somehow omitting the Malloy administration’s approval of NU’s merger with Massachusetts utility N-STAR, which created a company that now dominates electric power in New England.

Yes, such targeting or extortion is done by administrations of both parties throughout the country and years ago was done by Republican administrations in Connecticut too, if not quite as thoroughly, and it likely will be done by Connecticut’s next Republican administration if there ever is one. But in Connecticut only the Democratic Party has claimed to be the party of “campaign finance reform,” whereby the influence of special-interest money was to be reduced. The Democrats who promoted such reform now are silent as their governor returns state politics to the old ways that were stinky and often corrupt, the ways of what was called “Corrupticut.”

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So maybe Connecticut should start rejoicing in the old ways. Let it at least be acknowledged that politics here remains what Ambrose Bierce called it a hundred years ago, “A strife of interests masquerading as a conflict of principles; the conduct of public affairs for private advantage” -- remains far more a matter of mere power and patronage than the greatest good for the greatest number.

Maybe someday people will be telling about Connecticut the sort of sardonic stories told about Louisiana under Gov. Huey P. Long, the great Kingfish, who apocryphally is said to have explained: “People who supported me before the convention are going to get road contracts. People who supported me before the primary are going to get commissionerships. People who supported me before the election are going to get state government jobs. Everyone else is going to get good gummint.”

More reliably Long also is said to have sneered: “One of these days the people of Louisiana are going to get ‘good gummint’ — and they aren’t going to like it.”

Good government does not yet seem like anything the people of Connecticut have to fear from their own Kingfish.

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Connecticut’s Supreme Court is deciding former Bridgeport Mayor Joseph Ganim’s appeal to recover his license to practice law despite his federal conviction and prison term for corruption. The big issue in the case seems to be Ganim’s lack of repentance, but there’s a bigger and unacknowledged issue: the pretense of Connecticut’s legal system that there is special honor in the practice of law.

The Supreme Court itself essentially repudiated that pretense 30 years ago when, reversing longstanding Connecticut precedent holding that felons cannot practice law, it reinstated the law license of a Manchester man convicted of a felony in a motor vehicle fatality case in which he lied to police. But that case was not widely publicized as the Ganim case has been.

With so many watching, the Supreme Court should reinstate Ganim as a proclamation of “caveat emptor,” a warning that practitioners of the law in Connecticut deserve no more respect than used car salesmen, television preachers, or newspaper editors.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.